Microsoft XBox 360

I've never really gotten on with games consoles, more specifically, their controllers.  That was until the Nintendo Wii came along which changed things for me and I became an avid gamer for several years until the games became tiresome and the Wii's popularity slowly dwindled.

Give me a keyboard and a mouse and I can cope - give me a controller with fewer buttons/keys and I just don't get on with them.  That was until I got hold an XBox 360 controller that I used on my laptop to play Duke Nukem Forever (yeah I know, it's not a great game but I only paid £5 for it secondhand).

I found I got on quite well with the controller so I finally bit the bullet and last month I purchased an XBox 360 console along with a couple of games - GTA IV, NCIS and Flatout Ultimate Carnage.

The NCIS game is a lot weaker than I expected and it's a bit of a 'no brainer' so I'll keep it for when I just want to play a game without having to think too much.  Flatout Ultimate Carnage is a fantastic game with lots of cars, tracks and crashing to have fun with.  GTA IV is just as good as the previous versions but I haven't done many of the actual missions as of yet as I just keep driving around trying out the different vehicles I come across.

All-in-all I'm having fun with my XBox and the next game I will be getting will be one of the Raving Rabbids games, one works on the standard console but the other requires the Kinect Sensor which I don't have yet, but looks like a great way of playing games!

---

Apple & Microsoft Consortium Buy Patents

My first ever phone was a Nortel phone and the feature that made it stand out from the crowd at the time was the fact that it had voice-activated dialling and it was the only one at the time to have such a thing so I snapped it up!

The fact that no one I knew had a mobile phone was neither here or there! But if they did get one then I could call them by simply pressing one butting and saying their name (along with keeping my fingers crossed it would work) I could make a phone call to them!

Patent wars are becoming more common place these days and are highly sort after pieces of intellectual property. In my opinion the constant legal action taken by one company to another who then in return dig up a patent that the the other company has infringed, or worse still buys a patent from another company that the original company has infringed just so they can counter-sue them is not only daft but is stifling innovation.

So it is very refreshing to see that Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Ericsson, EMC and Sony have joined together in the form of a consortium which paid $4.5bn for around 6,000 patents and patent applications.

The fact that a consortium now owns these patents rather than an individual company can only be a good thing for the industry as a whole as (hopefully) there will be less legal bickering and more innovative and fantastic products for the general public to enjoy!